NextFarm - Energy And Food System" is a new technology package being developed to address a cluster of problems for farmers:
1. Expensive diesel fuel
2. Expensive fertiliser
3. Degraded soils needing more and more fertiliser
4. Degraded soils being less drought resilient
5. Increasingly variable severe weather.
6. Decreasing profit margins
We also address the accelerating climate problem:
1. Replace fossil fuels, not with just net zero CO2 emissions energy, but low cost, scalable, large negative CO2 emissions - 340% carbon negative compared to fossil fuel diesel in the same context. Negative CO2 emissions are needed now that we are beginning to pass climate tipping points due to unhelpful temperature feedbacks, with global temperatures accelerating.
2. NextFarm's CO2 drawdown aspect is in the form of biochar from non-food biomass, avoiding competition with arable land for food. Best practice biochar in agriculture helps restore degraded soil, improve crop yield etc, but is held back from industrial scale use by its cost of production.
3. The economics of biochar are transformed by co-producing biochar & some raw bio-oil for use on-farm energy (irrigation pumps, electricity & later farm vehicles). A fifth of the liquid used in production with our system, as well as all the syngas.
4. We solve the past barrier of prohibitively expensive upgrading of bio-oil to diesel fuel, not with chemical engineering, but a new multi-fuel engine, able to use cheap raw bio-oil. Manufacturing cost of the engine would be about the same as a diesel engine, & scale up not be limited by critical minerals.
5. The quickest path to market would be farm irrigation pumps, & on-farm electricity, our initial commercial goal.
Our new engine has full torque at zero revs & negligible vibration at high speed so is also suitable for automotive not just stationary use. Later markets are be farm vehicles, later heavy transport generally. Scale up beyond present agriculture & abandoned farmland is best via cultivation of hardy biodiverse native species as ecologically appropriate, assisted by best practice biochar restoring soil- making profit from sale of raw bio-oil as transport fuel. The new liquid transport fuel could retail at about 1/6 the cost equiv’ of diesel.
6. Risk is minimal with best practice biochar, & with the new engine's extremely clean exhaust.
More details on request, some aspects require an NDA.
Email: [email protected]
Website under construction
http://nextfarm.co
